


06. 11. ‘20. 01:39am

by iirusu



Series: Where the Geese Fly and Bulls Cry [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Description of blood, Hinted Dissociation, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, No Dialogue, POV First Person, Repressed Memories, Set in Colorado
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:42:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24703243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iirusu/pseuds/iirusu
Summary: Two people have a loose conversation while cleaning out the closet of an apartment in Colorado.
Series: Where the Geese Fly and Bulls Cry [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1785916
Kudos: 4





	06. 11. ‘20. 01:39am

**Author's Note:**

> If you feel like interpreting for yourself, don't read the endnote. I basically explain the whole thing lol

I remember I was sitting on the unshorn carpeted floor of your bedroom, leaned against the doorframe of your walk-in closet, and I asked about the hand-painted music box on your top shelf. I could tell by your rapid blinking that you felt like going on. Not particularly a monologue, or at least not intentionally so, but you’d said so little in a grueling thirty minutes that I had considered tuning you out several times throughout. I remember thinking you were a little vague, too. With your articulation, and just you, I mean. You were a vague person.

I stalled my fingers from flipping through the box of your medical documents on the floor and finally craned my neck to face you, and you were staring at that music box on the top shelf with an unreadable gaze that couldn't tell me if you were entranced by the most beautiful thing you'd ever seen, or disgusted, upset to your very core. I've been wondering about your core- well, I mean, the core of your mind. What is so far in you, past what's vague? I know ambiguousness is the lot of it. I just don't know who you are down to your heart. I listen to you start rambling- actually rambling this time, giving me something useful- about the hockey tickets you found in your letterman jacket, the ones you stuffed there in March of 1989 and meant to take out for so long, the thought eventually just becoming an overwritten memory. You went on thinking it had been something insignificant that you’d taken care of that spring.

You said that after your pause, after you looked at the music box on the top shelf with what I am now realizing was indeed an expression of well-hidden contempt. I don’t comment on it. Instead, I begin thinking about your mind once more. How did you rewrite a memory? Did something happen to you at the hockey game, something you couldn't bear to part with, so you’d kept the tickets? Or was it something you wanted so badly to part with that you completely rewired the event and put it back together to lessen the pain, making you forget your tickets? I've never been good at reading eyes, I never could figure how people do it. But I see your eyebrows furrow and under your hair I am able to see, just for a moment, a shift in your eyes’ atmosphere. And I realize that again, _I am right._ I begin flipping through your medical documents again. I don't want to think about what I will find in you if I continue to be right.

My mind wanders as I run my hands over old paper. Why am I suddenly afraid of what I'll find? I was just curious a moment before, prying without your knowledge and hunting for an answer. You ramble more about the hockey game and briefly mention a name that has your voice cracking momentarily and the hair on your neck standing up. I stop my hands for a moment to recognize that without my glasses, I couldn't have seen it.

I look back to your documents. I'm not really reading the words, and I make an attempt at pulling my mind out of its own world to listen to you again. And then my attempt fails because I realize, as you tell me what you saw, still vague as ever and bordering on another rant, that I am scared by how easy these answers were to find. You are so easy, and yet it took me the antique music box and a fading hockey ticket in your thinning closet to understand. It took just a moment for me to know. Why had I never taken a moment before? You continue going, and I've decided to stop my listening.

I start to read your late great grandmother's documents. They are nothing. Complex medical terms and statements of visiting history, with strange timestamps scrawled on the sides that I can't bring myself to piece together now, not when I'm still barely comprehending the individual letters. I flip and fold page after page, the documents growing more frayed and yellow the farther back I touch in the box. I am running my hands over the front now, spreading the dust from the back onto newer records. You're still going on in the back when I pick up from the very front, and I stop for a moment to read the cover. I read it again. And again. Again. And then I realize why my mind felt jumbled since you stumbled over your hometown’s 1989 hockey game.

 _You said your own name._ I've just realized that you’d said your own name there. And you saw yourself there. You were hearing the dissonance of the music box echoing around the rink and felt your hands tightening in your pockets. You were clenching your punched tickets.

I noticed that you've seen by now that I’ve stopped listening, and yet you kept going. In a desperate attempt to change the subject you know I’m now set on, you said you saw yourself being lonely as an adult when you were a kid and found that even though you had friends, you thought that you were right. I don't listen to this. I've only been focusing on your expressions since turning around again, and I am gripping the doorframe to better focus- you keep talking and I know you are growing confused, because you're _suddenly_ sharing these sad things about yourself, but I'm not listening. I’m fixed on the wall and spreading dust in the cracks because your confiding in me _was not sudden at all._ You keep talking about your inner turmoil, but still, I am all but white-knuckled against the frame, because you are still so vague.

It is a challenge now, to break first, you changing the subject or me giving in to comfort you for your misery- you don’t know the rules, though, so I am playing by myself. But oh, _it’s on._ It goes on like this, I am crinkling the brand new record and it goes on like this, for several minutes.

But I win. I win because oblivious, you tell me how you sat in the same hockey rink fourteen years before the forgotten game and for a few moments saw yourself at the other end, and you were dead. Your blood was flowing in rivulets down your body and soaked into your unfamiliar clothes, and you felt yourself choking out a nervous laugh as the dripping echoed through what you then realized to be an empty rink. You looked at it. You looked. But you saw no entrance or exit wound and thought it was morbidly comical, the way the blood was flowing.

You mean to joke, but as you laugh at the end I am letting go of the doorframe with a shaky exhale and turning to slump against it as I had been before, looking at the box in front of me. Our conversation is over. It takes a minute of your stunned silence, but when you realize this, you leave the room. Discarded on the floor where you once stood was the faded hockey tickets. Folded and curled, clearly stepped on. I lean far over to pick them up. They are soft under my hands, and with a short moment of pause, I realize that the dust on my hands is gone, fallen and embedded into the carpet, pressed into the cracks of the white wall I clutched as you rambled.

When I lean back into my post, I realize that the white papers I had been holding during our conversation are now crumpled and folded, edges torn and staples forced out. I don't look for the staples. The documents remind me of your hockey tickets, though only not as soft, and I force it back into the box until it is crushed at the bottom. My movements are slow. I don't make any move to go looking for you. _I already know where you’ll be._

I stay slumped against the doorframe, watching the sky go by through your window that I was sure had been dirtier when I got here. I think it always looks clearer after we have conversations like these. I don't change out of my clothes or go home, I just sleep against the wall, my hands around the hockey tickets. The discomfort of the hardwood against my back is outweighed by knowing I finally had a conversation with myself and got closer to the core of my own mind.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I hope you enjoyed reading this mess. I wrote this very late a few days ago in a sudden bout of motivation and centered that motivation on trying to write out a pretty convoluted explanation for how I dig up my own memories. I have trouble remembering things and have a feeling I've repressed memories over the years, and trying to dig up those things is pretty difficult. I have like conversations with myself in my head, asking for answers, and picking apart how I seem to feel and react to certain memories. I kind of have a fixation on understanding myself and my mind, and I really want to be able to understand everything, even though I know that I probably never could fill in all of the gaps. I tried writing the story so it feels like the two "people" in this really seem like different entities until the end, where it finally outright says they were talking to themself the entire time, studying how they felt and reacted, but being so deep in it that they acted like they were talking to an entirely different person. Some specific stuff in this is unimportant in itself (the music box, the hockey tickets, etc.) and are pretty much just used as examples. Anyway, comment if you had any thoughts or other interpretations, if any! I like reading them 👉👈


End file.
